Lord of the Rings has 9 books, not including the appendices iirc. If you check some of the older copies of the Lord of the Rings (pre-film ones) and leaf through them, you can see it was originally 9 books, not 3

Gibby wrote:Maybe there's too much of the book that they don't want to cut. It's a good thing in my opinion. LotR trilogy should've been 6 films. Â¬_Â¬

Nah, the vast majority of cuts were sensible. Certain things which worked in the books didn't (or wouldn't have) worked in the films - the Mouth of Sauron is a good case in point. When they put it back in the extended edition of Return of the King, it was a bit redundant since we already knew Frodo was alive and that the Mouth was bluffing. In the book, you don't meet Frodo in the tower until after that scene, so you wonder if he actually HAS failed and everyone's boned.

Also the scouring of the Shire would never have worked at the end of the film. And Tom Bombadil is a fruity 'tard.